Did you know that it
snows in the desert? Well it does. In some deserts, anyway.

When writing Desert Jewels, I wanted my readers to
understand the environment—including the climate—where my characters were
confined. So I added a scene showing their reaction when it snowed in the Utah
desert.

I asked several middle
grade students to comment on the manuscript, and a fourth grader said the book “kind
of jumped around.” Unfortunately, I had to agree with her. I was trying to
cover too much, and at times that desire took the story on a tangent. So when I
edited the manuscript to respond to beta reader comments, that snow scene had
to go.

But I still wanted my
readers to know that the Japanese Americans at Topaz had to deal with snow out
there in the desert. My solution? Tell, don’t show.

When I was done, I ended
up with this:

December
brought cold and frost and snow. But the snow melted quickly and turned the
dusty streets to gooey mud that tried to suck the shoes off Emi’s feet.

Even so, I’m still a big
fan of the admonition to “show, don’t tell.”

That’s why I’m reprinting
a September 4, 2013 post I wrote for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog.

The Greatest Show on
Earth

Why could Barnum and
Bailey bill their circus as “The Greatest Show on Earth?” Because it was a
feast for the eyes. They let the performers show the world what they could do.
If Barnum and Bailey had turned it into a radio show, their fame would have
been fleeting at best.

That’s also the
difference between showing and telling when reading or writing fiction.
Although the words are on a page rather than in a ring or on a stage, the
reader still wants to “see” the action in his or her mind’s eye, not merely
“hear” it with the reader’s inner ears. Or, as writers phrase it, “Show, don’t
tell.”

Actually, this is a good
technique for all writing. But it’s essential in fiction and creative
non-fiction.

In Revision & Self-Editing, James Scott Bell describes the
distinction this way.

Showing
is like watching a scene in a movie. All you have is what’s on the screen
before you. What the characters do or
say reveals who they are and what
they’re feeling.

Telling,
on the other hand, is just like you’re recounting the movie to a friend.

Here’s an example. Let’s
assume you are writing a children’s story about two boys who start out as
enemies but later become friends. It’s near the beginning of the book, and the
two boys get into a fight. You could write it this way:

Brian
was angry at Jason and beat him up.

Or you could write it
this way:

Brian
rushed at Jason, knocked him down, and repeatedly punched him in the face. By
the time a teacher separated the two boys, Jason’s nose was bleeding and his
left eye was swollen shut.

In the second example, I
didn’t tell you that Brian was angry at Jason. Nor did I tell you that Brian
beat Jason up. But you knew it because you saw it.

Which is more
interesting? I’m willing to bet that you preferred the second.

Of course, every writer
needs to tell at times. Otherwise, novels would be longer than the Great Wall of
China.

So how do you know what
to show and what to tell?

If a scene is important
to either plot or characterization, you should show it. To quote James Scott
Bell again, “the more intense the moment, the more showing you do.”

Telling usually works
better for transitions between scenes. As readers, we may need to know that
your protagonist left her office and went home. But you don’t usually need to
show her walking out the door, waiting for the bus, climbing into the bus,
watching for her street, getting off the bus, and walking in the door. “Jean
left the office and went home” is telling, but it gets her from one place to
another without boring the reader along the way.

Don’t get fanatical about
the distinction, however. Even most showing scenes include some telling. In the
example above, why do you know that a teacher separated the boys? Because I
told you. Another option would have been to say “a teacher pulled Brian away,”
and we could spend years debating whether that phrase is showing or telling. There
is nothing wrong with telling something in the middle of your scene if the
reader needs to know it but it isn’t otherwise important to the story.

Ron Rozelle’s book Description and Setting explains the
purpose of showing as “to let your reader experience things rather than to be
told about them, to feel them rather than have them reported to him.”

That’s why Life of Pi is one of my favorite books.
As I was reading it, my mind saw the violence of the wind and the waves on
stormy days and the brightness of the sun on calm ones. But it went even
deeper. The stormy days also had me hearing the roar of the wind, tasting the
salt spray as the ocean pummeled the boat, and trembling as the small craft rose
to the crest of each towering wave and dropped into the seemingly bottomless trough
between them. And the calm days had me sweltering in the heat and smelling fish
rotting in the sun. That’s what your writing should do.

Too much telling can make
a good story boring, and knowing how and when to show can make a mediocre story
great.

So go out and write the
greatest show on earth.

* * * * *

The picture at the top of
this post is a painting by Italian artist Gaetano Lodi, who was born in 1830
and died in 1886.